Mark's Notebook


	And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. - Soren Kierkegaard

14-month-old deaf twins get surgical implants to aid hearing

San Jose Mercury News

Wednesday 3 August 2005, 8:32 am
Keywords: News Articles , Health Topics

By HongDao Nguyen, Mercury News

When Olivia and Tallulah Hogan entered the audiologist's office Tuesday morning, the girls could barely hear the roar of a motorcycle engine with a hearing aid. But the 14-month-old twins left the room with technology that will enable them to hear their mother's voice in another room.

The Los Gatos girls, deaf since birth, are among the youngest in the country to have "cochlear implants" surgically inserted in both ears at once. On Tuesday, an audiologist at the California Ear Institute in East Palo Alto activated the devices amid a roomful of hushed onlookers and family members.

Their implants are thin, oval-shaped devices, about the size of a fat peanut, placed behind the ear underneath the skin.

The implants work with half-dollar-size magnetic microphones the girls wear on the sides of their heads and processors they wear in their pockets like small iPods to convert sounds their inner ears can process.

Though cochlear implants have been around since the 1970s, it's only been in the last few years that implanting two instead of one has become more popular, said Lisa Tonokawa, an audiologist with the Let Them Hear Foundation, a non-profit affiliated with the California Ear Institute. Two implants give patients a better sense of where sound is coming from.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/12290488.htm